When I was a kid, my first computer was the Mattel Aquarius. This machine was an odd little footnote in computing history, a quick experiment in Mattel’s history to break into the home computer market. This computer came out in 1983 and was quickly killed off in a few months because of poor sales. It had little promotion from Mattel and zero third-party support, and the remaining units were quickly blown out by liquidators as the video game crash was happening and Mattel Electronics abandoned hardware, then software development.

I’ve written a bit about this before, but to recap, the Aquarius was like the Yugo of computers. It had its charms, but the deficits were not good. It was a Z80-based machine, clocked at 3.5MHz, which isn’t bad. (A Z80 is arguably 2-3 times slower than a 6502; the 6510-based C64 was clocked at ~1MHz, so about the same.) But it only had 4K of RAM, and by the time you booted, you had just over 1K of free memory. The included BASIC was okay but not great. The keyboard was a rubber chicklet 48-key thing that was like typing on an 80s TV remote, and didn’t even have a space bar. Graphics were barely a thing, and it had a 40x24 character screen. There was a cartridge port, and then a cassette and printer port that were undocumented, with printers and tape decks being largely impossible to find. A couple dozen games were released on cartridge. There was also a mini-expander, a thing hanging off the cartridge port that let you use a memory expander (also impossible to find) with a cartridge at the same time, plus added joystick ports and a second sound chip. The joysticks were Intellivision-style “disk” controllers, with no side buttons at all, just six rubber keys in a keypad.

I got an Aquarius bundle at a Kay-Bee toys in January of 1984 for my 13th birthday. The $99 bundle came with a computer, the mini-expander and two controllers, and four games: AD&D Treasure of Tarmin, Tron Deadly Discs, Snafu, and Night Stalker. And as bad as the computer was, I played the hell out of those games, and spent untold hours typing in BASIC programs on the rubber keys, keeping the machine powered up because I had no way to save them. The D&D game was particularly good for the time, a first-person dungeon crawl game with crude graphics but great turn-based combat, 99 levels to navigate (allegedly), and addictive find-the-weapons-and-treasure gameplay, as you tried to find the King Dragon and win the whole thing.

I spent that summer mind-melding with that machine. This is unfathomable to kids now, but my school had like two Apple ][ computers that were impossible to get time on, and I wanted to work on a computer so much, I would spend study hall writing games and programs on paper. Having my own computer, as anemic as it was, felt like a miracle to me, and I’d spend all day trying to write games on it. I also wished I could go to California and hunt down the mystical tape deck or the rumored disk-based master expansion that never happened. My next birthday was a jump up to the C-64, and I have no idea when my original Aquarius got offloaded at a parental garage sale. But there’s still a lot of nostalgia for that old machine.

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So, 39 years later…

Like most retro machines, the Aquarius has a crew of die-hard followers who have been trying to hunt down surviving gear, tweak the most out of it with new games and software, and extend the system with new technology. A group of these enthusiasts decided to do a “reboot” of the Aquarius, since the rights have been long abandoned and the remaining hardware is aging and vanishing.

The result: The Aquarius+. (https://github.com/fvdhoef/aquarius-plus) The machine is very interesting:

* Backwards-compatible with the original system * Z80-based * 512K RAM (!!) * An ESP32 and an FPGA to support all the other fun stuff below * Wi-Fi and bluetooth * A USB connector for a real keyboard * A totally reworked video system with VGA video output * An SD card slot * Two three-voice sound chips * Everything on a single board with modern components you can buy new, in a slick-looking case about the size of a thick paperback book. * The whole thing is pretty affordable, especially in the world where eBay vultures who have driven up prices on every retro system out there.

What is really interesting is that everything is being developed in GitHub. You can look at all the source code, suggest changes, help develop it, and see everything documented. And that not only includes the ROM and firmware, but the actual hardware and even the case. Anyone with some skill at ordering custom boards and 3D printing could make their own Aquarius+. Or you can buy one from the couple of people making small runs of the machines.

I can’t emphasize enough how cool it is that all the docs and information are in GitHub. So a technical writer who is used to working in Markdown on GitHub (me) can easily make corrections. But also, back in 1983 I would have killed to get any information on this system. Compute! magazine was a treasure trove of type-in programs for literally every home computer except the Aquarius back in the day. Now, it’s super easy to share your programs or find other ones to try out and modify. No more leaving on the computer all night and then having my parents shut it off because I was wasting electricity.

My old cartridges are long gone, but the new system does have a connector for them. That said, about every cartridge ever released (and a whole lot of new homebrew ones) are available as ROM files you can easily throw on an SD card and load.

The SD card situation is a game-changer, too. First of all, the smallest SD card you can find in the back of a junk drawer can hold every Aquarius program that ever has or will exist. (Seriously, the tiny stepped-on image at the top of this post is 15% bigger than every released Aquarius cartridge combined.) I always dreamed of a way to save my programs, or get more software, or even get the cable to use a tape drive on my old machine. (And having had a tape drive for the C-64, this was a horrible experience, but still better than nothing.) Anyway, I now have a way to quickly load and save things, and easily trade them with the world.

Speaking of programming, aside from being able to see what others are doing in BASIC or assembly, there are a couple of other additions. First, I finally have access to the elusive Extended BASIC cartridge that was unobtanium back in the day. Second, there is active development on an improved BASIC. But also, there’s a C SDK, which makes it super easy to write and compile C into executables. And it’s also cool (and weird) that I’ve got all this in Visual Studio Code, the modern IDE I use at my day job. And no more rubber keys!

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Once I stumbled into the dev group, I cloned the git repo, and was astounded at everything all in one place. But what was more amazing is that they had a full-fledged emulator I could run on my Mac. After installing a couple of things, I was able to build it, and I was sitting at the Ok prompt of an aqua-colored 40x24 screen. I did a quick 10 print "hello" and loaded up a few games, and all was well. I also wrote a quick printf("hello\n"); in C, compiled it, and ran it in the emulator. Cool.

I contributed some quick docs for Mac developers and picked around a bit more before I left for Poland. The emulator was cool, but I really needed the real thing. Luckily, I got in touch with Sean Harrington, who was building a bunch of units. In short order, I had a tracking number, then I had a package in the mail with serial number 15 of the Aquarius+!

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First things first: I somehow don’t have a real VGA monitor anymore. Every flat screen in this house has been updated and upgraded multiple times since WFH started, and the d-shaped 15-pin connector I’ve been using since the 90s has gone the way of the dodo. I have this tiny monitor I use to debug broken systems, and I used that for a minute until I could get a VGA to HDMI converter.

The ESP32 is a bit persnickety about the keyboard and joystick. I ended up picking up a twenty-dollar Cherry tenkeyless and the latest XBox controller, and with those three things and a USB power source, was able to boot up with no problems.

It is really weird to be sitting at the workstation where I work and write every day with the screen being the computer I had almost 40 years ago. It’s even more strange to be at the BASIC prompt of an Aquarius with a real keyboard and an actual space bar. Of course the first thing I did was fire up the AD&D game.

OK, the graphics are not that impressive here. Most things are drawn using custom graphics symbols or ASCII characters. But this game is still fun. Once again, weird to see this on my 32-inch 4K screen and control the game with the latest XBox controller instead of the weird little disc joystick thing. (There are ports for those if you happen to still have one.) But there’s like honest jump-scare action when you’re hopping around the dungeon and all of a sudden have a dragon in front of you hammering away with fireballs in your face.

The amazing thing with this new machine is how well it integrates with 2023. For example, you run a little program to configure the machine, and it enables you to point it to your local Wi-Fi network. Okay, you won’t be browsing the web on this thing (yet?) but you enter a command and the machine will go to GitHub, pull the latest firmware, and install it for you, which is amazing. The machine also works as a WebDAV server so you can push files to the SD card. It’s also got a REST API so you can  push files, enter remote typing to the console, or update the firmware. (I don’t talk about my day job here, but I’m sort of familiar with APIs…)

Anyway, I wish I had as much time to play with this as I did back in 1983, because I still have a million ideas in my head. How can I write a web browser? How do I get that text adventure game going? What about a micro lisp interpreter? That space war game still needs to be written. Working at a startup and having a mortgage is a bit different than summer vacation with nothing to do when I was 13. But I know C. All the docs are here. I’m done with grad school now. I’m looking forward to keep busy with this little thing.

I went to Kraków, Poland a couple of weeks ago. And I don’t know why, but I absolutely have not been able to jot down any thoughts on it. Maybe it was because the trip was so quick. Maybe my plans were so haphazard. Or maybe it was such a lopsided trip, with a heavy event in the middle and a bunch of dumb stuff on either side.

OK, here are some random thoughts:

• SFO to Frankfurt to Krakow. I left Saturday night, spend four hours in Germany, ended up in Poland on Sunday night.
• They named the airport after the Pope. They are really Catholic there. Really, really Catholic.
• I stayed in the old town part of Krakow, in a ridiculously nice Hilton. The old town area looked like a Universal Studios backlot of a European city. Walking around at night was roughly as safe as walking in EPCOT center in the afternoon.
• There was a pierogi place a block from the hotel and I ended up going there three times.
• I went to this Galleria mall to buy a shirt for a formal dinner. It was the first time I’ve been to a mall since maybe Iceland. Totally uninterested. It sort of bothered me. So, that’s over.
• Bailey was asking me every hour if I’d gotten kielbasa yet, so I went to some restaurant that I think was just called “kielbasa” and ordered a sampler platter. They brought out a platter for an entire basketball team, probably twelve pounds of meat, plus a loaf of bread, two salads, soups, pickles, and 17 other things. That broke me, and I skipped the food tour the next day because I could not deal.
• I also went to some fancy foodie 9-course dinner, which was okay but not that inspired.
• Went to Auschwitz. I can’t even write about this because it was so horrific and the whole thing is so politically charged. It was an incredibly heavy experience, and everyone should go.
• I took this absurd tour of Nowa Huta, the old communist planned community built around the Lenin steel works. A guy dressed like a 90s chav showed up in a tiny Lada Niva car and acted like a Sacha Baron Cohen character. Seeing the old steel worker town was interesting, and it’s not terribly gentrified (yet).
• I went to the aviation museum, which is one of the biggest in Europe. They had a ridiculous number of MiGs and other Soviet combat aircraft, at least two dozen. I think they had more MiG 21s next to each other than I’d ever seen at all other museums combined.
• My flight out of Krakow left at 6am Saturday. Spent more time in Frankfurt, then landed in SFO at like 3pm.
• Great trip, but way too short. I didn’t hit any museums, or the palace, or the salt mines. I also didn’t spent much time out of town. I feel like I could have easily spent another week here.

Wasn’t terribly happy with my pics, but I’ll go through them eventually. (I still haven’t posted pictures from Denver, Stockholm, or Iceland, so this may take a bit.)

I have complicated and conflicting thoughts about AI. On one hand, everyone in my industry won’t shut up about it. On the other hand, I think it means I have between three and seven years before my profession is completely obsolete. And spinning the numbers, I think I need about ten solid years at my current salary to retire.

A few years ago, I read about how MLB was using some special software that could be fed a box score and a machine-readable database of statistics and spit out a human-readable narrative article summarizing the game. It would pepper the article with various factoids, slap in a stock photo, and you’d have a ready-for-web article to pull in traffic and SEO. When I saw this, I realized software documentation was not far behind. We’ve used tools like JavaDoc for decades to pull comments out of code and extrude a set of generated documentation. The next step is to spit out more conversational blog posts about a software product. That is either already happening or about to happen. But that’s work, and I don’t want to talk about work.

As far as self-publishing is concerned, it seems the current arguments are all about AI artwork for covers. I’ve only vaguely messed with DALL-E and nothing I’ve ever gotten out of it looked like book cover-quality, or maybe I’m too picky. There’s question about where the source material comes from, etc etc. I have no real opinion on this, except I wouldn’t use it because it looks like garbage. That said, I wouldn’t pay someone a ton of money for a cover and hope it would magically boost my book sales. Any time I’ve paid more than zero for a book cover, I haven’t recouped my costs. But my books are horrible/I’m not a good marketer/whatever. Anyway.

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Three takeaways on AI, at least for the moment. Bear with me.

First, I think AI can be a useful tool for doing monotonous things, organization, or other busy work. I’ve forever wished that Scrivener had hooks to run AppleScript, or maybe had a REST API, so I could eventually write some useful tools for dumb stuff that could easily be done in AI. For example, I’d like to feed all of my writing into an LLM and then be able to write a paragraph and ask the AI “did I already write this?” because it happens constantly that I come up with some great idea and it turns out it was in a short story I published in 2006. It would also be great for things more advanced than a spell check, like looking at a story I just turned from first to third person and finding all the stuff that’s wrong. It would also be useful for things like feeding a thousand blog posts into it and having it add keywords to all of them.

All of these are good tools, but I have no time to think through how to write them. And my second point is there are a lot of tools springing up, but we’re in the gold rush era where a lot of fly-by-night businesses are popping up with the word AI in their product, and every existing product is working on how they’re going to duct-tape AI on the side. And all the usual complications come up here: tools are half-baked, and don’t exactly do what you want, and won’t output text in the right way, and steal your data, and have some scammy freemium model, and think asking for fifty bucks a month is totally fine even thought two dozen things an hour all think it’s totally fine if they also charge you fifty bucks etc etc etc. Most of these companies will vanish in six months, maybe along with your data. And the big problem with this is the same problem I have with mind map software or outline software or note-taking software: I could spend all day every day in decision paralysis with these tools that do maybe 47% of what I want but not everything I want. Or I could just write.

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The third thing, which is a big one, is that there’s this debate on if these things can write fiction, and people feed things into ChatGPT and ask it to write a poem about Barbie just like Emily Dickinson or whatever. Some of these are marginally impressive, but I’m not convinced. It seems like this is more of a parlor trick, and not really effective for creative writing.

I think writing will end up seeing a reaction similar to what happened when photography was invented. Portrait painting was essentially democratized and the art form basically destroyed, as anyone could sit down for a photograph. And Romanticist and Neoclassical painting fell out of favor, styles that were dependent on highly realistic painting.

What happened was that Impressionism suddenly appeared. Painting traded fine detail for the exploration of capture or representation of movement in a scene. The idea of realistic detail was gone; instead of the capture of fixed images like any camera could do, it focused on giving up detail and looked into different representations of color or light. I’m not an art historian and I’m leaving a lot out of this description, but the gist here is that one thing Impressionists were thinking about is what they could do on canvas that a camera couldn’t do on a silver plate.

The next step beyond that was modern art, which decided to completely question what was art and what rules applied. There’s way too much history to capture this in a paragraph or two, but the general idea is that artists started finding ways to turn inward and attempt to express feelings and emotions and capture them in medium that was entirely not photorealistic. Instead of using a picture to evoke the actual details captured, it used it to evoke a mood or an idea.

The thought here is that artists at the turn of the 20th century saw that portraiture was obsolete, so they moved on to something cameras couldn’t do. Is that what’s next for writers?

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So I’ve been screwing around with ChatGPT, using it to write summaries of books. It’s very good at this when it knows about the book. There’s a danger here: people write unique summaries for optimal SEO and store rankings, and pretty soon, everyone’s going to be writing absolutely identical book summaries, which is totally going to break SEO. This will become more and more weaponized, and the race to the bottom will continue on that.

Anyway, I asked ChatGPT to write a summary of my last book, The Failure Cascade. It wrote a well-formed and very convincing summary, but it was not at all for the book I wrote. However, the plot was very interesting, at least for a conventional linear “straight” book.

This made me wonder: where was it getting this plot? Did it have some cookie-cutter set of twenty book plots and it would mad-lib in a few things to make it look unique? Or was I reading a lightly retouched plot from a 1987 book by J.G. Ballard that I’d forgotten about or never read? My first thought was to steal this plot wholesale and start beating an outline and writing chunks. But I quickly decided nope, bad idea.

Fast-forward to this weekend, and I see an ad for this writing tool that offers to use AI to punch up outlines and brainstorm and make it super easy to “write” a book. (I won’t mention it by name, because I don’t want to get into it with them.)

So, I got a trial account. It started with a brain dump box, where I would enter my loose ideas. I pasted in the aforementioned book summary. It then wanted me to enter a genre, so I put “post-modern apocalyptic, bleak.”

It then wanted to determine a writing style, so I pasted in about a thousand words of the unpublished Atmospheres 2 manuscript. It chewed away for a moment, and it spit this out:

First-person, past tense. Sarcastic and cynical tone with informal vocabulary. Vivid and descriptive language, slow pacing, grotesque imagery. Reflects poverty, desperation, and decay in contemporary America.

OK, fair enough. I then had it generate a synopsis, a character list, and a chapter-by-chapter summary. The synopsis was a seven-paragraph thing and looked okay. The character list: okay, I guess.

The summary was five acts, nineteen chapters. It was radically formulaic, and each chapter was labeled something like “Rising Tension” or “All is Lost” or whatever Save the Cat-ism was needed at that point. The outline was not horrible, but it was so formulaic, it reminded me of like a Marvel movie totally written by committee.

I then told it to get started on the first chapter. It first broke out the three-sentence summary of the chapter into 19 beats. I then clicked the next button and it churned away and wrote the 3500 words of the first chapter.

The writing - the actual prose - absolutely horrific. I didn’t expect it to be like my writing, but it was amazingly bad. Stuff like:

“Jim,” Laura’s voice cracked as she stumbled over a charred piece of wood. “Do you think it’s always going to be like this?”

 

“Like what?” I replied, sarcasm dripping from my words like acid. “Hell on earth? Probably.”

The thing is - the writing was horrible, on like an eighth-grade level of wooden. But I think like 90% of the self-published Kindle genre page-turners I’ve read for five minutes and then deleted were about like this.

I went to generate chapter two, and I was out of coins or stars or tokens or whatever magic beans it used, and it wanted a credit card. Nope, the experiment ended for me.

I think my takeaway with this is that this tool might be good for generating a formulaic outline. And it would be great for dumping out extremely predictable Kindle dreck. Start with a good series bible, get a decent cover artist, and write your next dozen detective murder mystery books with ease. I guess this is great if you like that kind of book. Maybe not great if you spend a lot of time and make all your money writing this kind of book.

This type of tool is currently useless for writing anything expressionist or experimental. And as I look for a direction to go with my writing, it’s evident that I should be going in the exact opposite direction of genre fiction, and do things that absolutely couldn’t be done by an AI. Right?

I journal. A lot. I started journaling in 1993, and I more or less journal every day. There were some times when there were gaps, but I now religiously put pen to paper every morning for at least a page.

My problem (or challenge) is that I now have probably too many different journaling systems. Just to think real quick:

• This is a journal, of sorts. I used the term “journal” when I started this thing back in 1997, before the word “blog” was invented. It’s far from daily, but maybe I need to work on that. There is something like 1400 posts here, which is a bit excessive for a WordPress site. Just checked, and that totals up to 1,065,687 words.
• I use Moleskine journals for the daily paper journal. I used to use spiral notebooks, but switched to the hardcover books in maybe 2010. There’s a printer paper box of the spirals in storage, and then I’ve got about 15 of them on a shelf next to my desk. There’s some thought about scanning all of these, but I don’t know an easy way of doing this aside from cutting them apart or spending my lifetime in front of a scanner.
• I use Day One to journal on my computer or phone. I like the look and feel of Day One, and it’s nice being able to drop in a picture or a quick note when I’m in transit or at work. Part of my thing on the Iceland trip was sitting at breakfast and writing a quick summary of the day before. I also do a lot of automatic writing every day when I don’t have an active project, and I file those brain dumps in Day One. I started using it in 2013, and there are periods when I write daily, and then chunks of entire months when I completely forget about it. There are 1,312 days of entries in there, 1399 entries.
• I started using separate Moleskines for therapy-based journaling. I’m only a few into that.
• I used to carry a Field Notes journal in my pocket for jotting down writing ideas or for taking brief notes while at lunch or whatever. I remember first buying a three-pack at the public market in Milwaukee at a little gift/card shop across from the spice place. I think I have about a dozen of those full of scribbling. I also probably have two or three dozen in storage. I used to be on their mailing list and every time they announced some new special edition, I felt a compulsion to buy them. I also had some of their pens, which are just the standard Bic customizable Clic pen, and I would use them until they wore out, for all my writing. For some reason, you can’t easily buy like a three-pack or a dozen Clic pens, so I ended up buying them by the dozen from Japan. Japanese people love their pens.
• I’ve used Scrivener for all my writing, and for a long time, my automatic writing was in there, so I could easily move chunks of it into my morgue file and then into books. I’m starting to question my loyalty to Scrivener, but that’s another post.
• There was a LiveJournal for a while, but we’ll forget that era ever happened.
• I use Obsidian at work to take meeting notes and day-to-day things. I also used Notion to take notes for school. I’m not happy with either, but that’s yet another post.

I don’t know why I document everything like this. A few reasons maybe include a need to refer back to things, to easily brainstorm ideas without self-censorship, and maybe to someday leverage my journaling into actual writing. I think I had some dumb idea that at a certain point, a university was going to show up with a moving truck, a few people in white gloves with clipboards, and a blank check to move everything to an archive. That obviously isn’t happening.

There was also this thought that I’d publish my journals at some point. This brings up the issue of public-facing journals versus private, and self-censorship. Having to keep in mind who can see things online or in print - family members, coworkers, exes, etc. -is a real wrench into the works for my writing process. A lot of the “what do I write here” is gummed up by who will see it. I know I have people who stalk me here and I have to just let that go and avoid documenting certain parts of my life. Yes, I could lock it down, or blog anonymously. Why is it important to write here? I don’t entirely know, but I’m sure if I thought about it, that’s yet another blog post. (I’m really building up a backlog here.)

Being able to write unimpeded in a notebook or in Day One is helpful to me. But it also makes those journals a huge liability, and I’m not about to waste a lot of time stepping on these old entries to get them in a book form. I published my entries here form 1997-1999 in a book, and I think two people bought it. So I’m not spending any effort on that. Maybe you’ll see them when I’m long gone, but I have a very strong feeling everything here is going to get landfilled when that happens.

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All of this makes me thing of Robert Shields, a former minister and avid diarist who was written up in The Eccentropedia. (That book, by the way, is like in my top five all-star all-time books, and you absolutely need to get a copy, no questions asked. Trust me on this.) Anyway, Shields basically live-tweeted his entire life, long before that horrible site existed. He would only sleep two hours a night and then spend hours and hours typing up everything he saw, ate, shit, thought, or dreamed, from 1972 to 1997.

This ended up being 90-some boxes of journals, 37.5 million words. He would sometimes paste in food labels and even his nose hair so maybe someone in the future could study his DNA. When he left the journals to Washington State University, he stipulated that nobody could read them or generate a full word count for fifty years after his death in 2007.

A quick excerpt from his wikipedia:

July 25, 1993 7 am: “I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin.” 7.05 am: “Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used five sheets of paper.”

This obsession is interesting to me for whatever reason (the journaling, not his 7:05 am procedure), but the fact that he basically couldn’t leave the house to do this makes it maybe a bit impractical. Maybe if he had Day One he could have traveled a bit.

(He was originally from Seymour, Indiana, BTW.)

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Anyway - the reason I started thinking about this was that Day One has this feature I didn’t know about where you can print books of your journals. It’s just for printing one-offs, like if you have a baby journal of photos or whatever. I decided to try this out by printing my 2013-2015 entries in a single hardcover volume. It was not cheap (fifty-some bucks, I think) but it looks very nice. It puts the photos in there and made a nice cover. It also adds title pages for each month or so, which show a map of where you were, and what cities were visited. (Oh yeah, Day One keeps a lot of metadata on things like your location and the weather.)

The journal looks very cool, but because it’s all private info, there’s no way I could publish this. It’s interesting for me to read. There are a lot of book and story ideas I completely ignored or never followed through with, some stupid and some maybe useful. I would often take a selfie with my laptop camera before I started writing, and it’s interesting to see me 40 pounds lighter, still having hair, sitting in the Frankfurt airport trying to get in a thousand words after being up all night on a transatlantic flight.

I think the most compelling thing about the old entries is that in 2014 or 2015, I was struggling with a lot of the same questions about my writing and dealing with the same interpersonal drama I have now. A lot of that hasn’t been resolved, and some of the entries look like I wrote them last week. There’s a lot of work angst in there too, and I guess that’s much better now. But it makes me realize exactly what I need to be working on.

And I say all of this after publishing a two-thousand word diatribe about how I need to look forward and not be nostalgic. I think there’s some difference between introspection or investigation of the past and using it as my drug of choice. Another blog post? Looks like I have a lot of work to do here. I should take notes. Where?

[OK, so, this was a year ago. And I never finished writing it, really. This is mostly a scoop of the daily emails I sent John as it was happening. For various reasons, I never did a full write-up and I didn’t post a set of pictures. I wasn’t happy with the trip, maybe because of other stuff going on then. I wrote maybe five paragraphs about it a month after the fact, and a few pictures went to Instagram, but that’s it.

Here’s what I did finish. I’ll clean it up a bit, but it isn’t complete. This is just for completeness, and to clear out my queue. -J]

Hello from Stockholm. Actually, hello from 40,000 feet over Iceland, where I’m a couple of hours into a ten-hour flight back from a week in Sweden. I usually write these trip reports while I’m still in town, but I didn’t have time. And now I’ve got nothing but time, so here goes.

This has been a weird trip. I had to take this week off, based on my work schedule, because if I didn’t take vacation, I wouldn’t get another chance until October. Last year, the same thing happened, and I drove down to LA for a week, to try and write and to see old ghosts. Now, I’m not writing, and didn’t want the nostalgia. And I wanted to leave the country. I hit Expedia and tried to find what cities were a direct long-haul flight from SFO. I’ve already done Amsterdam and Frankfurt. London, too. Dublin was a thought. Dubai was way too expensive. Zero interest in Paris. I think Copenhagen and maybe Zurich were on the list, but neither clicked with me. Then I ran the numbers on Sweden, and gave it a think.

I’ve had some interest in Sweden forever. Back when I was writing about death metal, Sweden was pretty much the home of the genre (although there were a lot of artists from Tampa, and some in California, too). At the start of the first wave of death metal in 1991 and 1992, I interviewed a lot of bands, traded tapes through the mail, and knew maybe a half-dozen bands from Stockholm. I didn’t know if the youths into extreme metal were at all representative of the country as a whole. I guessed not; it was probably similar to the outcasts in the metal scene in the US being an example of American society as a whole, which they very much were not. So Sweden’s always been in the back of my head. And I like Germany, and Sweden seemed to have some similarities, as far as a strong economy, progressive society, and old history. So, why not visit?

I got a good deal on the flight and the hotel, then promptly forgot all about the trip, too busy with work and school to do any planning. I bought the Rick Steeves book, but didn’t even look at it. Right before the trip, I googled a few basic things, but not much more. I had a wide open plan. Famous last words.

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8/8/22

The flight out was okay, although I slept maybe four hours the night before, woke up way too early, and worked on a paper as I waited for my 0500 departure. I drove to SFO, dumped my car there, and took a short flight to LAX. Ate some lunch at 0900 and then got in the big plane to jump across the top of the globe and back down. I can’t sleep on a plane, so I paid €25 for the spotty Wi-Fi and bothered people online during the whole flight. I ended up landing at Arlanda airport the next morning, effectively losing a day. That’s when the fun began.

First, I waited an hour for luggage. The airport is almost minimalist and has nothing in it. It’s not like there’s a Cinnabon and McDonald’s every ten feet, because the idea of making people eat five thousand calories an hour to maximize shareholder value just hasn’t come up yet. Coca-Cola is sold in a ten-ml bottle. Why would someone want a gallon of it in one sitting? Everyone smokes, though. Later that day, I saw an 80-year-old woman on a bicycle, smoking.

After I got my luggage, I took the Arlanda Express to the city. This is a bullet train that goes 125 MPH and gets you from the airport to downtown Stockholm in about 17 minutes. Everything about that was cool, and the train itself was as clean as a Disney monorail in Japan.

I got to the hotel and had six hours to kill, which was just swell because I smelled like a homeless person and felt like my face was covered in KFC. Dropped off my bags and started walking, just the camera backpack and the big gun out, the Canon 5DS with a giant L lens on it. On the surface, Stockholm’s a 16th-century Euro city that’s never seen war and has been thoroughly modernized from a good economy. But as I walked around, a few things were apparent. First, it was Sunday morning, so everything was closed. Second, the city’s been sort of locked down to stop the homeless situation. It’s not as apparent as the anti-homeless stuff you see in cities in the US, but you can’t find a public toilet anywhere, or a place to sit down for a while and relax. It feels very safe and sanitized, but cold.

The people - also a bit cold. I thought everyone spoke English here. Well they do, but not by default. Everything is in Swedish. Signs are all Swedish. Everyone speaks Swedish. Everyone speaks Swedish to me. I don’t know if it’s my looks, or that I’m not in a big pack of people so they assume I’m not a tourist, but in restaurants and such, people are just rapid-fire blasting Swedish at me and I cannot parse it at all. It sounds goofy, like the Swedish chef or some Monty Python skit, and I am just sitting there going “yeah! sure! coca-cola!” or whatever, hoping they will eventually realize I am the stupid American and switch to dumb-people language. People are somewhat cold and standoffish. Well, not somewhat - totally. I’m hoping if I go to a few record stores, the people will talk metal or jazz and calm down a bit. [They didn’t.] Otherwise, this trip is going to be just museums, long walks, and school.

The bathroom situation - there are pay toilets, but I had no coins and no money. And no banks were open. I eventually found a small urban mall and went to the Ikea (of course) which had futuristic pay toilets that took credit cards. A swipe of the plastic gave me access to a little cubicle toilet that was spotless and played bird/nature sounds. It was bizarre. It turns out everything in Sweden takes cards and the thousand bucks of US cash I brought with me was useless for the trip.

I ended up at a fake British pub in a mall, eating far too much Swedish charcuterie that tasted all salty and bizarre and took an hour to show up. Reading memes. Wondering what the fuck was going on. Went to take a piss and the bathroom was about three feet by three feet with a trio of the low-hanging pissers with no walls. A guy who looked like Jethro Tull’s roadie was in there, and immediately launched into “blorgenforgen slusvshen fiergon sclurben!” and I was like yeah I’ll wait outside.

After six hours of walking, I checked in at the joint. Hotel was okay, and I took my much-needed shower. Blacked out for an hour, had no idea what century I was in. Went walking and looked for dinner. I was in a weird area where there are a lot of offices and everything is either lunch places you go to drink and be seen, or places you grab a sandwich and go back to the office. It’s all closed by five. I walked for two hours and ended up back at the 7-Eleven and scored a pre-made salad and some ice cream. Ended up walking twelve miles for the day.

I am not awake. The time difference is fucking me. Last night I would sleep three hours, wake up, start texting people in the middle of their day, sleep two hours, etc. I probably need to get out and walk a bit after it warms up, find a museum or something.

More pictures later. I have not sorted everything. The sun is really weird at this latitude, and you’d think with the long days you would have tons of light, but what it means is you have like ten seconds of perfect light, and really long shadows for the rest of it. I’ll figure it out. Or not.

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8/9/22

Exhausted. Can’t nap. I was up until 2 belting out a paper, then I think I woke up at about 730. I got the paper done though. If it goes through, that’s another class over. Yesterday was a bit of a non-day. I walked to this shopping district about twenty minutes south, because there is this record store called Sound Pollution that is infamous with the death metal scene. Small place, half the size of my apartment, and I got there when it opened, so it was largely empty. The guy working there just looked like a straight older gentleman, not the long-haired metalhead I expected. Most of the stock was new and not collectible/old, but they did have a wide range of things. I’m completely out of this scene and just listen to the same dozen albums from the early 90s, and Swedish people won’t chat, so I was a bit overwhelmed shopping, Texted Ray, who was still awake, and I tried to confirm rarity on a few records. Bought a few things, but I have no way of playing them, so that’s cute.

Saw a TGI Friday, which was empty. I was tempted, because I could sit down, eat fried food, and maybe get a Coke bigger than a thimble. I went down a side street and found an OG Swedish restaurant, the kind with the antlers on the ceiling and the look of a Scandinavian hunting lodge. Lots of bizarre game meats and whatnot. When in Rome. I ordered a reindeer meatball plate, with the lingonberries and the potatoes pressed into a ring. Some kind of cream sauce, the usual. Not bad, but I also got a slice of Swedish chocolate cake, which was like 5000 calories and I barely stumbled home.

Alternated between unconsciousness and doom-scrolling on my phone. All of my ads online were turning Swedish, and so were my Google search results. Also I’m used to scheduled ads and news stories breaking during the day, Then I went to a Burger King next door, because I had to force myself to eat at 5:00 or it would suddenly be midnight with everything closed. No cash registers - just big touchscreens and card readers. I got some weird chimichurri burger. Got back here and burned the evening on that stupid paper.

Not sure what I am doing today, but I need to get out of the room now. I feel like I’ve walked too much right in this central area and need to get out. I also don’t feel like I’ve taken a decent picture yet. I should try harder today.

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8/10/22

Trying to get rolling. I slept almost 8 hours last night, albeit in two shifts. I really can’t hack the sleep situation, and will probably get used to it the day before I have to flip back 9 hours again.

Yesterday I took the subway out to the big Westfield mall in the suburbs. The train was immaculate. You could do open-heart surgery on the floor. Perfectly clean, no distractions, no problems, and it also seems like I have a perfect five bars of 5G everywhere in this country, even when underground. Subway stations are absolutely surreal, giant caves blasted deep underground like a Star Wars base, painted up like modern art masterpieces. The mall was insane. Built in 2015. 1.1 million square feet. Three floors. Zero vacancies. Two full grocery stores. Maybe 250 stores. No anchors, but it had inline stores that were as big as a typical Macy’s in the US. Busy on a Tuesday afternoon, probably about as crowded as a Saturday at a good mall in California. So that was cool. It also involved about 15 minutes of walk each way through a suburb that was very Swedish, or reminded me of when I was in Nuremberg walking in the suburbs. Lots of very clean and modern flats in ten-story towers, mixed in with old chalet-looking houses.

Slept in the afternoon. The time difference is getting very depressing, re keeping up with friends online. I wake up, and they’re about to go to bed. I top to check my phone during lunch, and everyone’s asleep. I go to bed during their afternoon. Etc.

Went walking last night, and on a goof, I went to Pizza Hut for dinner. It was more of a sit down place like a bar or bistro, with EDM music playing and beer on tap. I got a personal pan pizza and it tasted identical to one I’d get in the US. THey had a bunch of weird stuff on the menu, but I didn’t want to fuck things up.

Meanwhile, I have been here four days and still haven’t seen a cop. No homeless encampments. No litter. No drama. Things just work. Too bad the people are so eh.

I think I’m hiking over to that Vasa ship museum if I can wake up. Everyone told me to go to it, so I guess I will.

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8/11/22

I’m at the point in a solo trip - always happens around day 5 - when the depression becomes overwhelming. I’ve done everything and I’m sick of all of it, and looking forward to the dread of having to pack it all up and wake up at 3am for the flight back.

I went to see the Vasa yesterday. Big warship from the 1600s, where the king built it as the pride of the fleet even though everyone said it was an idiotic idea, and then the fucking thing sank before it cleared the harbor on its maiden voyage. They found it and raised it in the 60s, restored it, and now it’s indoors. It’s interesting to see, but I had no patience to walk around reading all the displays about what kind of food sailors ate in 1632 or whatever the fuck. I went next door to the viking museum, and that was even more of a bust. It’s a place not much bigger than my apartment, where you walk around looking at various plaques and timelines, with the occasional sword or hand-woven blanket. Then, gift shop. People here are ga-ga about the viking thing, the way people from South Boston are hung up about Irish heritage and won’t shut up about Guinness. Saw a few guys with their arms covered with rune tattoos pawing through all the books and fake swords in the guest shop, and realized this whole thing wasn’t for me.

Was just looking at the import from yesterday and this 5ds camera is not great. It’s too heavy, and the high-mp sensor means it’s impossible to get good shots that aren’t blurry unless you’re on a tripod. Absolutely not the camera for walking around. I am almost tempted to trade it back in when I get home, maybe get a small mirrorless for the next trip.

No idea what I am doing today, but I really need a long walk. At least I’m getting in my steps. But I’m thoroughly sick of the area right around the hotel, and I’m too lazy to take a long train ride out to nature or whatever.

That paper went through, so another class is done. I’m now at 64% completion. The remaining three classes are all ball-busters, and no more papers. And then the capstone. I am 60% confident I can finish by the end of November, but it all depends on how fast I can finish this finance class. I watched an hour of the omnibus video, and it’s all more or less stuff I know already from accounting. Famous last words.

I have that 8am flight and I just got an email from Finnair saying to get there 3.5 hours early due to them not knowing how to run an airport here. It’s a 30-minute train ride away. So Saturday is going to be fun.

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8/12/22

More no sleep last night. I sleep like two or three hours, then wake up and spent a couple hours doom-scrolling, then maybe sleep a few more hours. I am delirious today.

Yesterday was a lot of long walks. I went to this record store district to poke around, and there were a lot of cool stores, but I don’t buy vinyl, and when I want to listen to something like Miles Davis, I usually just type “Miles Davis” into Apple Music, listen to it for five minutes, and then I’m bored of it. No need to spend $300 on some special mono-mix obscure European pressing.

I went to this mall that wasn’t really a mall - the name “Gallerian” means two things, and one is the situation where you have a dozen of stores and a grocery in the first floor of an office building. (Sorry, the “E” floor. The first floor is on the second floor.) Anyway, I bought a coke zero from a coffee place, sat down in the chairs in front of it, and two minutes later, a security guard comes up and starts yelling at me in rapid-fire Swedish. I guess you can’t drink in a mall, even though they sell drinks and have chairs and tables in front of the place selling the drinks? OK whatever. They do not fuck around here.

No museums. Sick of museums. Not sure what I want to do today. I’m so sick of this camera, and just realized new Canon gear is about 10% cheaper here, although maybe they have some insane sales tax. Part of me wants to pick up a Canon 6Dii just to get something that works more like my Rebel as far as metering and program mode. I swear the best pictures I’ve taken on this trip are with my phone.

Some big clusterfuck with checking in to my flight this morning. I had to call Finnair and get them to walk me through it. I think I’m checked in, but who the fuck knows. I fully expect them to say I forgot to file my 824794-D22 or whatever, and I’ll have to wait in line for three hours. I also forgot that I have four hours in LAX this time. And when I land, I still have to drive home from SFO, during rush hour, on no sleep.

I haven’t even started the return-to-work dread yet, but I’ll probably get to that later.

I have spent very little money on this trip. I have a thousand dollars in twenties in my computer bag, and it turns out Sweden is 100% cashless, so that was a wasted effort. And I still have cash from my early 2020 Vegas trip in my wallet, so I have no idea what to do with that when I get back.

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8/13/22

On the plane on the big hop west. We just got our little omelette patty kit and I ate that in three seconds. I woke up hourly last night, sort of got 6 hours in, but they turned the dining room into a disco on Fridays, the most annoying hotel trend ever. So I heard the boom-boom-boom until about the time I woke up, which was 0300. Showered, packed, and got to a 0435 bullet train to the airport. About an hour of lines and nonsense and I got to the gate. We left maybe a half hour late. I’m back in the window seat, with slow internet and 9:26 remaining. Then a four hour layover (but I have to clear customs) and a short hop to SFO. I will get my car out of long term parking just in time to hit Giants traffic.

Did absolutely nothing yesterday. Walked ten miles and took a bunch of pictures, but nothing phenomenal. Ate dinner at McDonald’s and it was largely identical to what I remember a quarter pounder to be from the last time I had one. And they call them a Quarter Pounder in Europe. Sorry, Quentin Tarantino.

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8/14/22

I’m back. What a brutal fucking trip home. No sleep, of course. When I got to LA, I cleared customs very fast. They asked if I had any food, and I said no, and they stamped my thing, next. Not even the token “welcome to America.” There was this whole clusterfuck of a maze to get through for the connecting flight, getting my checked bag and moving it out of security to another place, then going back through security again. LAX has terminals that are by letter, number, and gate number, and I don’t know the taxonomy, but you have to actually leave the building to move between them. When I got to terminal 5 with four hours to spare, I asked the TSA agent if there was food in there, and she said sure. I got in, and there was a See’s candy, a news stand that was out of water, and some salad place that had one person working and the line was immobile. Absolutely no place to sit down, and it was one of those environmental air conditioning things where it was 90 out, so they air condition down to 87.

I said fuck it, left the secure area, found a cabbie, and told him to take me to the Taco Bell by my old house in Playa. I was going to play nice and say “let’s go through the drive-through and I’ll buy you lunch” but the guy was an old russian dude who looked like Boris Yeltsin and had no idea what I was talking about. I went inside and the service was so slow, I thought I was still in Sweden. Sat in the dining room and inhaled my stuff. A guy came up to me in a winter coat - not a good sign - and asked for some money to buy chicken because he hadn’t eaten in two days. My Ugly American “go fuck yourself” system wasn’t turned on, so I gave him ten bucks. He proceeded to bolt and not get any food. Welcome to America.

Took an Uber back to the airport, and by that point, I’d completely hit the wall. I just wanted to get on the plane before I blacked out, which I did. Woke up just in time for landing, and then I forgot that SFO from the local gates to the baggage claim to the parking garage is literally a five-mile hike. I then could not find my car, even though I had a GPS-tagged photo of it with the sign number in front of it. I hit 101 just as Giants/Pirates traffic was piling up and it took an hour to get home. I think I made it until about 7:30 then blacked out. Back up at 3.

The Apple Watch measures each hour you stand every minute, with my usual goal being 12 hours a day. Yesterday, because of the time change, it registered 28 hours for the day. Nice.